Today I want to show you how I make my BW photos with a hint of colour. There are several ways to do this, so my way is only one of many.
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This is how you can do it in
Photoshop 6.0 and newer versions. For Elements I don't know if it works like this.
All photos in this tutorial can be
double clicked to be viewed in larger versions.
Shortcuts and menues I talk about in this tutorial will be for Photoshop 6.0 and newer versions of that.
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You open your photo in Photoshop(
Ctrl+O). Duplicate your layer(
Ctrl+J) to make an identical layer of the photo. This is now called
Layer 1.
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First I want to make Layer 1 black&white. Make sure Layer 1 is highlighted on the Layers Palette and then you desaturate the photo (shortcut
Ctrl+Shift+U). Layer 1 is now in BW.
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I think the contrast in this BW photo don't look good so I want to adjust it. I add an
Adjustment Layer to Layer 1 by clicking the black&white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose
Brightness/Contrast. I adjust the contrast until I think the BW layer looks nice.
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I then want the butterfly to have some brighter colours. I click off the BW Layer for a while and I make sure the Background Layer is highlighted. Then I add an Adjustment Layer to the Background Layer by clicking the black&white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose
Hue/Saturation. I move the arrow at the Saturation bar to +36(depends on how bright you want it to be) and get some nice bright colours to the butterfly.
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Now I've adjusted the BW and the colour layer the way I want them and it's time to make some magic happen! First make sure you've clicked on the BW layer again. The Layers Palette should now look like on the print screen above. You should now have
two Layers(Background and Layer 1) and
two adjustment layers(Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation).
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Now you make sure
Layer 1 is highlighted on the
Layers Palette. Then you go down to the bottom of the Layers Palette and add a
Layer Mask(a square with a circle in it) to Layer 1.
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Now you go to the
Tools Palette on the left side and the
Colour Palette. Make sure you have white selected as the foreground colour and black selected as the background colour.
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You can now choose the
Eraser Tool on the Tools palette.
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You decide the size and softness of the brush up on the Menu line. I use a quite large brush to start with and later I will go over with a smaller brush on the small details and edges.
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Press down the
left mouse button and start erasing over the object you want to be in colour. You will now see the colour start to appear in your BW photo.
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Don't worry if you erase outside the lines of your object. As you see on my image I have some orangecolour from the flower which is visible. I don't want it to be like that and want to add back black/white to the things outside my object(butterfly).
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The cool thing I can do now is to go to the
Colour Palette, use the arrow in the corner and switch to
Black as Foreground colour. If you now try to erase over the object, you'll see that you reverse the erasing from earlier and add back the B/W.
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I also zoom in on the image, and use a smaller brush on the Erase Tool to go over the edges of the object. This can take some time, depending on the details of the object. So by working like this, changing between black and white as foreground colour, and chaning the size of the brush, you 'll get a nice result in the end.
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Here you see the finished result again. Remember to
save it as a copy so you don't overwrite your original photo. If you
save it as a photoshop file(.psd) you can also open it again later and continue your work.
Good luck!
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